Roundup of Articles on Fine-Tuning Your TAS Processes
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
Over the past several months we have addressed several ways to optimize your telephone answering service and help position you to increase your efficacy and enhance the service you provide to clients.
Here’s a recap:
1. Optimize Your Sales
How long does it take your staff to respond to a sales inquiry? Now make it faster.
2. Optimize Client Onboarding
Once a client signs up for service, how long does it take you to set up their account and begin answering calls? Do they find this acceptable or frustrating?
3. Optimize Customer Service
How long does it take you to acknowledge and correct a customer service issue? Do you ever lose clients because of it?
4. Optimize Agent Hiring
Do you measure your hiring process in terms of weeks, days, or hours? How often do you lose a promising employee because you didn’t react quickly enough?
5. Optimize Operational Processes
What does your policies and procedures manual look like in your answering service? If you don’t have a manual, how’s that working for you?
6. Optimize Agent Training
What steps can you do to make your agent training more efficient and more effective?
7. Optimize Billing
How many steps are involved in producing invoices? How much time do you take between billing cut off and sending invoices? The longer it takes, the more you hamper cash flow.
8. Optimize Collections
What is your average days payable (also known as days payable outstanding)? Seek to collect more of what’s owed to you faster.
9. Optimize Accounts Payable
How quickly do you turn around invoices? Seek to pay faster to win your vendor’s appreciation and build a buffer for times of tight cash flow.
10. Optimize Tech Support
Is the technical aspect of running your answering service a strength or weakness? Regardless of your answer, look for ways to make tech support better.
11. Optimize Admin
When it comes to overhead effectiveness, look for what you can eliminate, delegate, or streamline. Make sure everything you do counts.
Pick the item on this list that deserves the most attention and will produce the biggest positive change for your answering service. Then pursue it. Once you have one item done, pick another one to work on. Work through this list until you have streamlined your entire answering service.
Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.
Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.
